


Promises

by smashurbanipal



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Ever So Slightly Suggestive But Nothing Actually Happens, F/M, Marriage Proposal, Missing Scene, Movie: Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, One Shot, Relationship(s), Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26773897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smashurbanipal/pseuds/smashurbanipal
Summary: Anakin makes a promise, and Padmé makes a decision.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Kudos: 42





	Promises

“So what now?" Anakin says the moment they're back aboard the Nubian.

“Now you escort me back home.” Moving a little stiffly from the stitches and scabs spanning her back, Padmé passes through the lower deck to the turbolift. Six foot two of dutiful adoring watchdog, Anakin trails her.

“That’s not what I meant."

Padmé knows. She's fighting the gravitational pull between them even now. To Anakin, a Force-sensitive empath, it must be nearly unbearable. But as usual, she's brushing him off, trying to distract him with the task at hand because she's trying to distract herself from her own conflicted emotions. She can't keep doing that to him. Not after the arena.

"We'll talk it all over soon, I promise. Let's just get off this planet first," she says, and the turbolift doors swish open to the cockpit.

"You're back!" C-3PO exclaims, flinging his arms into the air. Both the tone and the gesture are what Padmé would describe as overjoyed, if he were a living being. He has to be the most emotive droid she's ever known. Perhaps unsurprising, considering his maker. Anakin leaves a spark of his passion in everything he touches.

Padmé smiles as she settles into one of the pilot's seats. "You haven't been waiting that long, have you?"

"Sixteen standard hours, thirty-eight minutes, and eleven seconds,” C-3PO replies promptly.

“But who’s counting?” Anakin quips, examining the fresh scrapes on the droid’s chassis.

C-3PO manages to look especially blank for a moment. Padmé can almost see his processors working. “Ah! A joke,” he says at length. “If you don’t mind, sir, I would very much appreciate a tuneup sometime on our voyage. My connective wiring has been cut and refused several times and may need to be replaced. I have had quite an adventure—as have the two of you, I understand. I am not programmed to give medical diagnoses or advice, but I am nonetheless very relieved to see you both apparently recovering. Organic self-regeneration is a marvel indeed. As always, if either of you requires my services, I would be more than happy to oblige. For now I shall excuse myself so that Master Ani—"

“No," Padmé interjects. "I’d like you to copilot for me, Threepio."

She can all but feel Anakin's glare boring into the side of her head, but she's not going to acknowledge him and invite a debate. His flying, while undeniably skilful, can be stomach-churning at the best of times, and the hastily applied field prosthetic now standing in for his dominant arm surely wouldn't help matters.

"Oh." C-3PO turns his head a degree in Anakin's direction, and then back. "Very well, Mistress Padmé."

Padmé doesn’t understand why the Jedi sent Anakin back with her at all. She didn’t object, of course, and he does probably number among their finest warriors even with one arm, but he should be en route to Coruscant for rehabilitation, not still on a simple (and, in Padmé's opinion, unnecessary) protection mission that another Jedi or even a couple of clones could handle.

If Padmé's presence is supposed to be some sort of test, he's failing spectacularly. He never takes his eyes off her while she primes the engines. Then again, maybe that's because he's itching to take over. She can hear him squirming in the passenger seat behind her while she goes through the launch sequence, but he stays put and says nothing. Good. He's learning.

Once they clear Geonosis' atmosphere, Padmé lets C-3PO calculate the hyperspace jump and twists around, one leg tucked under her and her arms folded over the back of her chair. Anakin looks sullen, but that's hardly unusual.

"For your question." She takes a steadying breath. "I don’t know what happens now. Nothing I said back on Naboo has changed. If anything, we need to take our duties all the more seriously now that war seems inevitable." She's unconsciously defaulting to Senatorial oration: laying out the facts, speaking slowly, thinking a few sentences ahead. Anakin's having none of it.

"What about what you said on Geonosis?" he cuts in. "Has that changed?"

"I was getting to that. I also meant what I said then, and my feelings haven't disappeared in a day."

"Well, this is your chance to recant that confession, since it seemed to be predicated on the assumption we wouldn’t live to see the consequences."

Padmé regards him, impressed. “For someone who hates politicians, you can certainly talk like one.”

“I never said I hated politicians. And I talk like myself. Sometimes I just use words of more than five letters. I’m not—“

“A little boy, I know. You don’t have to prove yourself to me, Ani.”

"Anakin," he corrects her automatically, and then sighs.

Padmé indulges in a smirk. "I thought you'd given up arguing with me?"

"I have. Old habits."

"Maybe next you could work on waiting for the full answer when you ask a question."

"Oh." He looks a little stunned—perhaps even stung—then drops his gaze to the floor. "I'm sorry. I don't always realise people aren't done talking.”

Having a conversation with Anakin, Padmé muses, is like being in a vehicle he's piloting. Unexpected twists, giddying tailspins—and sometimes abrupt stops, like this one. She has to regain her balance.

"I'm just teasing you, not scolding you," she says gently. "I’m not your Jedi Master.”

This time, Anakin lets the silence linger several seconds too long, still not looking at her. "So what is the answer?"

“The answer is that I don't have an answer. I have an obligation to the Republic I can’t deny, and feelings for you I can’t deny, either.”

He does look at her then, and although he's wearing his tight-lipped neutral Jedi face, Padmé's struck by how he expresses more in his eyes alone than other people do in their entire bodies. "You're not making this easy for me."

"It isn't easy for either of us. I'm sorry, Anakin. I'm trying to do the right thing, and this time, I don't know what the right thing _is_."

"I do. Let me tell you." He pauses, tension in his form and a question in his eyes. He's learning, Padmé thinks again, and this time there's a quiet desperation in the thought. The last thing she wants is for him to know her and mould himself to her, for their personalities to become inextricably intertwined. It's also what she wants more than anything.

She leans toward him, slips into orbit. "Tell me."

Anakin's next breath is a little heavier, like he'd been holding it waiting for her answer.

"I should have gone after you, when you fell from the transport. I would have. I nearly did. Obi-Wan had to talk me down. And I know now I shouldn't have listened to him. We weren't ready to capture Dooku then—not even Yoda could. I failed the Republic, the Jedi, myself... and you." He barely brushes his fingers against her arm, like she's a holy relic he's unworthy to touch. "Jedi are taught that everything has meaning. There are no accidents, no coincidences. I tried to suppress my feelings for you and I suffered for it. I won't make that mistake again."

He leans in suddenly, his voice lowering to little more than a whisper.

"I promise you. From now on, whenever I have to choose between you and _anything_ , I will always choose you."

Caught in a tailspin, her heart in her throat, Padmé doesn't know what to say. She has a conversation with the stormclouds in his eyes. They ask, and she answers.

The journey is a dance of half-hesitations, achingly slow. But once Anakin's lips are pressed to hers, gently, reverentially, he makes up for his inexperience with an almost uncanny attentiveness. He's always perfectly synchronised with her. No sooner does she want more than he gives it to her; no sooner does she crave his touch than his left hand finds the back of her neck and draws her in closer.

He’s getting bolder. Were his other hand not a new prosthetic, she wonders if he’d be resting it on her knee. She wonders how his lips would feel straying down her neck...

His breath hitches, his body shifting, and Padmé realises she should be more careful where her thoughts wander when she’s this close to him. She's not sure she'll ever get used to this. All her life she's been living in a history book of wars and politics and public figures. Now she feels like the princess in a strange and wonderful story where a slave boy has magical powers, and fulfils an ancient prophecy, and sweeps her off her feet—

The ship jolts. Padmé is nearly thrown back over the seat into Anakin’s lap. He steadies her with both hands, and she's startled by the feeling of metal clamping onto her shoulder. He notices—of course he does—and releases her at once.

“There!" C-3PO announces. "We are in our first hyperspace lane. I estimate we shall arrive in—Oh, goodness me! I do beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Bless my circuits,” he adds to himself, lowering the volume of his vocabulator as he hastily turns back to the controls.

Anakin and Padmé are both laughing too much to even attempt to pick up where they left off.

“I’m very sorry, Threepio," Anakin says, rising and offering Padmé his left hand. He doesn't let go after she stands up. “We’ll continue this somewhere we won’t offend you.”

“Oh, I’m not offended, Master Ani. I simply wasn't expecting it," C-3PO replies, his photoreceptors fixed forward on the whirling funnel of hyperspace. "You and Mistress Padmé are of course welcome to do whatever you please, and it's not a droid's place to have an opinion on it. I shall keep my attention resolutely fixed on piloting this starship—resolutely, sir!—and suspend my communication protocols so as not to disturb you. You won't even know I'm here...“

His voice fades as Anakin and Padmé, who know better than to expect anything of the sort, retreat to the crew quarters farther back in the ship.

* * *

"So we're at an impasse," Anakin says as he settles on the edge of a bunk. "We can't live a lie, but I can't live without you, either. To try to go back, and pretend I don’t—don’t...”

Gingerly perching next to him, Padmé can almost see the wall where his eloquence runs out and his conditioning kicks in, and her heart aches. She still remembers a boisterous child happily babbling to her about anything and everything. He used to be so much better at expressing himself, so generous with his affection, so easy to read. He used to openly say he cared about her. Now he bites his lips and fumbles through abstractions and metaphors, and the guilt seems to almost physically pain him. Somehow, ten years with the Jedi have broken a part of his spirit that not even nine years as a slave could.

_What have they done to you?_

She's familiar with the famed Jedi calm and their habit of speaking in platitudes and riddles: qualities instilled by their lifelong training, she assumed, and neither of them necessarily undesirable or unethical. But she's never had to watch emotion and forthrightness being trained _out_ of someone.

She's supported the Jedi Order for her entire political career. She doesn't intend to stop. That unnerving impassivity makes them excellent negotiators and mediators, and she'd much rather rely on diplomacy than military might. But Anakin is a special case, and just this once... she thinks they're wrong.

She tries to look encouraging. Back on Geonosis, she gave him the vocabulary, repeatedly, emphatically, hoping it would ease a little of his suffering to tell her what she already knows. He still hasn't used those words.

_Say it. Say you love me._

“—to pretend I don’t feel... how I do... for you,” he manages eventually, under his breath, “ _that_ would be the lie.”

Padmé considers asking him directly to specify what he feels. Then she realises that at that very moment she's employing one of the tricks of her trade out of habit, a little mental disconnect to keep her disappointment off her face. Anakin's not the only emotionally closed-off person here, or even the most, and he has more reason to be. As he so frequently insists, he's _trying_ —testing the word out in philosophical discussions and rhetorical questions. It's not her job to fix him, anyway, and if she's honest with herself, she's not trying for his sake. It's just what she so desperately wants to hear him say.

"I'm not asking you to stop feeling for me," she says, resorting to his own vague wording for his comfort. "That's unreasonable, probably impossible."

"Tell that to the Jedi," Anakin mutters.

"And," Padmé continues, undeterred, "I'm not going to ask the same thing of myself anymore, either. But I don't know where to go from here. You said yourself that possession is forbidden."

He frowns. "Do you think loving someone is possessing them?"

Padmé mentally kicks herself. He's learning, and now she has to learn, too: to be careful how she speaks of ownership.

"I didn't mean it like that," she says, apologetic. "And I don't know nearly enough about the intricacies of Jedi philosophy to debate it with you. But it's true that you're not allowed to have relationships, isn't it? That they’ll expel you?”

“I’ve already done something they’d expel me for,” he says. He doesn’t have to elaborate. They both know.

“Regardless," Padmé goes on, cutting that thread of conversation as quickly as possible, "I will not be the reason the Jedi Order loses its most promising trainee, at the beginning of a war, when they need you more than ever. You have a future, a destiny—“

“Don't you start lecturing me about destiny, too.” There’s an edge in his voice. She’s hit another nerve. Really, she thinks, this man is nothing but nerve, in every sense of the word. "The older I get, the less I believe in it. How am I supposed to bring balance to the Force when I can't even bring balance to _me_ ? I..." He shakes his head, dismissing the topic. “It doesn't matter. I don't want to be chosen _._ I want to choose. And like I said, I choose you. My future and my destiny. They're you.”

 _My future..._ Through the warm haze these grand romantic statements of Anakin's always evoke in her, that nagging half-formed thought in the back of her mind mulls on the phrase, and his remark a few minutes ago about the difficulty of following conversations takes on new meaning. She doesn’t pretend to understand the mysteries of the Force, but she was privy to some of Qui-Gon’s observations about him, and recently witnessed the power of his dreams firsthand.

“You see the future," she says, contemplative.

His brows draw together. "Sometimes."

"No, a lot of the time. That's how you react so quickly, isn't it? A little too quickly, when you're talking to people."

"Oh. Yes. I think most Jedi can, with focus, but for me it's... yeah, most of the time. I can't really help it. Just, I don't know, a second ahead, or a fraction of one. I usually only see beyond that when I'm asleep.”

Padmé pauses to admire him. When she thinks of the Jedi trying to see the future, she pictures wizened old scholars in dark chambers, concentrating, appealling to the Force for a glimpse of insight that could better the galaxy. And then there's Anakin, who can literally do it in his sleep, and uses it to pilot like a maniac and kiss better.

Which brings her to the real question.

"Did you see any of this? Us?”

He struggles for words.

“You did,” she answers for him, her mind drifting back to their strange reunion that now begins to make a little more sense. “I remember. You told me you dream of me. And I _have_ changed in the last ten years. You just dreamt of me as I am now.”

“I guess that does seem more likely,” he admits, haltingly.

“So what did you see?”

He's beginning to look hunted. “Just short moments. Snatches of conversations. The first time I kissed you. And... other things.”

"Things that haven't happened yet?"

"Things that might never happen. I can’t always tell what’s a vision and what’s just a dream." 

He's flushing behind his tan. Padmé laughs, and then leans in to whisper conspiratorially, “I dream about you sometimes, too. And I don’t have an excuse.”

Anakin's answering chuckle carries an undercurrent of anxiety, but the confession loosens his tongue nonetheless.

"I did dream about you a lot. Ever since I was nine, to be honest, but especially in the months leading up to this mission. By then it was nearly every night. So when I first met you again, it was... surreal. Like we were strangers, and old friends, and old lovers, all at the same time. It felt inevitable, and that made me overconfident—so caught up in myself, and the you in my visions, that I didn't see that the real you wasn't there yet, and I apologise.” 

Padmé doesn't doubt that he means it, but there's something in all his apologies that feels rehearsed. She gets the impression he has to employ them often. He’s right that he’s overconfident, but somehow he’s simultaneously all too aware of his own shortcomings.

"I'm sorry, too," she says, trying to relive those early interactions through his eyes and not entirely liking what she sees. "I didn’t have any Force visions to prepare me for how much you'd changed. I... needed a little time and distance to get used to it. But even then, I could see you’d become a competent Jedi and a good man. My condescension was uncalled-for."

“Not at all," Anakin says calmly, to Padmé's surprise. "It upset me, and that made me meditate on it, and that helped me realise what I was doing. No accidents, remember? If I had kept pushing, and you’d kept pushing me away, would we be having this conversation?”

“I suppose not,” says Padmé, suddenly aware of how close they are. He smells like bacta and leather.

“I was assuming the future is immutable, and I should have known better," he goes on. "I told you, I don’t believe in destiny; I believe in choice. You know mine. Tell me yours.”

In one sudden dizzying motion, he rises and then falls to his knees in front of her, head bowed, a knight pledging himself to his queen’s service.

“I’ll be anything you want me to be. Anything. Command me.”

It’s beyond a tailspin. Gravity turns inside out.

The sensible voice inside Padmé tells her to break it off now, before she gets even more attached. She's gotten over boys before; she can do it again. She can still have the family she wants. She can find someone else...

And wish he were her strange, troubled, petulant, sensitive, wonderful Jedi instead, with the sadness in his eyes that makes him all the more beautiful when he smiles. Anakin isn't just another boy, not to her. He feels everything with painful intensity and it's infectious. He's introduced her to whole new rainbows and constellations of emotions, surprising and delighting and frustrating her like no one else can, sometimes all at once. 

She used to think love might be the fluttering in her chest when Palo looked at her, the novelty of being taken out to dinner by a charming aide. But no, Anakin taught her love, true damn-the-consequences love that burns through her inhibitions like a supernova. She wants to live for him; she wants to die for him; she wants his sunlight laugh and his hands in the dark; she wants to take apart that fractured mind of his and put it back together with her inside, sharing his pain, grafted into him like a cybernetic limb.

She isn't stupid. She sees his anger, his paradoxical arrogance and insecurity, and of course it gives her concern. But she knew him before all that, when he was just a slave and she was, as far as he knew, just a handmaiden, and he cared for her anyway. She sees what he could be. At the core of him is a rare and precious spark of selfless, sacrificial, foolish love, shining through all the cracks in his indoctrination and the shadows of his moods. For ten years he’s already loved her from across the stars. It may as well have been forever. He’ll love her until he dies, and beyond. In the galaxy and in her heart, there will never be anyone else like him.

Maybe he's a lost cause. But Padmé has spent her life championing lost causes. 

The sensible voice inside her told her not to return to her occupied planet, one girl against armies. Her sensible voice told her that it wasn't worth risking her life on a doomed rescue mission for one friend. That voice was speaking when she told Anakin there was no chance they could be together.

But there's another voice inside her that tells her to do what's reckless and hopeless and right, even if it kills her. And that voice says, aloud, softly but assertively: “Be my husband.”

Anakin raises his head. He looks as taken aback as she feels. It takes him a moment to form words. “You want to marry me?”

“That’s what I said." She's scarcely able to believe it herself.

“Padmé, we don't—” He cuts himself off. “What am I saying? Of course I’ll marry you. Of _course_." He stands up, beaming, breathless, and takes her hands in his. She doesn't flinch at the cold metal this time. "We can have the ceremony in the Lake Country—outside, maybe, among the waterfalls—and invite your family. And when we get back, I'll... I'll tell Obi-Wan I'm leaving the Order. When I'm not a Jedi anymore, there's no reason for our marriage to be a scandal, and you can keep your position in the Senate. Your sister..." There's a shudder in his voice and his eyes are shining as he echoes the sentiment she expressed to him weeks ago. "...has two amazing children." 

Overcome by emotion, he releases her and paces the room to compose himself. And then stops. He stands there, a hand over his face, and she watches it slowly dawn on him that she's not participating in his enthusiasm. "Padmé...?"

Everything he's saying is everything she wants. Hell, she wants to go even further and leave the profiteers and bureaucrats to the war they brought upon themselves. If the Senate ever finds a spine and some morals and wants her back, it can find her rolling down a hill with Anakin, grass in her hair, laughing.

But that's wishful thinking. People like her cannot be happy while others suffer. Not while she can help them. She knows Anakin is like that, too, even if he won't admit it to himself.

It takes every ounce of her will to say, "We can't tell anyone, at least until the war is over. That's my condition. I'm so sorry, Ani."

When he speaks again, his voice is even rougher than usual, an abrasive scrape against a stony silence. "I thought you said..."

"I know what I said. Keeping a secret like this will test us in every way imaginable. But as much as I need you, right now the Jedi need you more. I don't see any other way to reconcile the two. Do you?"

She can see him trying. Seeking options, dismissing them.

"No," he says at last. "You're right, as usual. And if that's what I have to do, I'll do it." He returns to sit next to her, his arm braced behind her and his eyes half-lidded in a way that makes her very aware she’s on a bed. "I’d do anything for you. Padmé, I..."

He hits that mental wall again. But Padmé just smiles.

"I know," she says, and pulls him down by his braid to kiss him.


End file.
